Author's notes: I really hope this is coherent enough for consumption.
It took two whole years for the occultists in Vault Gesserit to create a metaphysical schema of a ritual to safely bore into the Warp. Two realtime years, anyway. Careful application of time dition and age rejuvenation made actual time spent closer to a century. That the occultists as a whole pushed themselves to finish the monumental task without seeking my aid was highly impressive. Even more impressive still was the amount of byproducts discovered or created to allow the ritual to take form at all.
Tiberium-fueled ‘mind cleansers’ that allowed one to peer into and interact with the Warp without suffering its corruptive effects, extra-natural energy siphons that vacuumed up leaking Warp energies, even near-literal soul safes that were basically fortified anchors of a person’s identity to keep their essences from being suddenly torn out of their body by mishaps. All that and more innovations were found in the vault, all while we kept to a proper working schedule and forced the occultists involved to take their prescribed breaks.
The muse collectors were created to allow for that, a ritual that was part mental-backup and part amnestic that gave researchers the chance to simply drop what they were working on to enjoy a well-earned vacation, and then return back to the task right where they left off in terms of inspiration and train of thought. The standard sanity integrity checks also ensured that nobody suffered a mind break.
Two realtime years of hard work underground, and we now had the means to metaphysically freeze and solidify the otherwise amorphous and unstable dimension to enact a rather audacious rescue. Two years of working on the relics and information the Eldar so freely gave for experimentation, which had the pleasant side effect of making most of Vault Gesserit’s employees fluent in the Eldar nguage.
And then it took another year to let the Eldar seers do their thing and figure out the right time to pull off the infiltration, because I still forbade divination from being practiced within the Nexus (especially after the whole Rasputin ghoul-thing in the Siberian wastes). As it turns out, charting the shortest path in the tumultuous Empyrean wasn’t too hard, if one had a glimpse into the future to cheat with and time wasn’t a factor. Thankfully, our window didn’t take too long to come, just another couple of years before the stars literally aligned for Nurgle’s Garden to creep over to the right pce.
Five years in total was spent before we breached the Warp, and in that hectic time the Nexus Unity grew comfortably in contrast. Our new home in the ruins of old Commoragh expanded quickly, but even then there was still plenty of space, enough that we could safely mount the portal in one massive, reinforced structure far from the creeping megacity. Of course, nobody’s moved in yet except for some researchers and MCV operators, just to keep things on the safe side.
By the time our chance came, I had a cloud of Tiberium-hulled Sentinels hovering above me and Edward and the rest of the 1st stood at attention right behind me, ready to join me into the breach. Lelith and the rest of the Nexus Eldar were mixed among them, surprisingly integrating well enough that they were already seen as just another fellow comrade by my elites. The girls were not present because I needed them to run the Nexus, no matter how much Cait tried to weasel her way out of her chores.
Off to the side, Eldrad Ulthran led the Eldar division with several hundred warriors and seers, along with their vehicles, assembled in silence, looking intimidating enough with their sealed conical helms and exotic weapons. The armored bodysuits and vehicle hulls came in a diverse range of color combinations, based not only from the craftworlds involved, but also the Aspect Warrior shrines that were basically cults formed out of specialized disciplines of war. There were even clusters of the followers of the Laughing God, easily standing out by their outndish and colorful suits.
Probably because they’re a psychic race, the air of anticipation radiating from them was actually tangible, creating a faint shimmer in the air around them that my console picked up as an emotional manifestation. Even the Harlequins, the space clowns of the Laughing God, were still and barely moving, which I took as a sign of how big a deal this was going to become. Interestingly, there were no signs of the Phoenix Lords that led the retively new Aspect Warriors. Maybe they were out doing other tasks or busy being temporarily dead.
The huge digital timer stuck to the side of the huge portal frame of metal and wraithbone counted down the moment of convergence, fluctuating every now and then as its sensors in the Warp picked up minute changes in the extradimensional currents. It added annoying tension to the wait every time the timer adjusted itself to add a second or ten, but on the other hand the relief was immense when it finally hit zero and a pleasant ping rang throughout the cavernous portal hall.
“Cabal, confirm convergence,” I said aloud, more for protocol than anything else.
It took several seconds before the AI responded. “Confirming metanatural environment beyond Type-H dimensional veil matches the requisite phenomena. Natural reality is now aligned with Type-H subsector ‘Nurgle’s Garden’.”
“Cool. Initiate Operation Herbicide.”
It was very, very satisfying to hear the hum of interdimensional machinery humming to life, and the countless time-dited hours of work being put into effect. Runes on the portal’s frame glowed to life in a myriad of colors as yers of preset rituals fired off with a touch of my divine power.
I didn’t need to glimpse beyond this reality to see the effects of the metanatural tampering. The Eldar contingent stumbled as one, while their walkers and grav vehicles tilted for a moment as they were grazed from the tampering by their connection to the Warp.
No heads exploding, so that’s another bonus paycheck for the occultists coming up. And credit to the space elves, even being forewarned, I’d say they took the little disruption rather well. They recovered quickly, some hastily rechecking weapons and armor integrity while others reattuned their psychic abilities.
On the other side of reality, the roiling tides of the Warp juddered to a stop for the first time as a normally impossible cascade of rites overwhelmed the whole realm. To put it (somewhat) simply, I temporarily fsh-freezed the churning sea that was the Warp by injecting a rger volume of unyielding Order. Unpredictability and change was, for the moment, locked down by rigid certainty and stasis.
Emphasis on ‘temporarily’ and ‘for the moment’, because even with me constantly topping up the Tiberium ttice embedded in the walls of the structure sheltering the portal to power all this, I can’t outrun metaphysics yet. Still, this whole feat should buy enough time for the operation.
“Stasis achieved,” Cabal reported for the benefit of everyone else, and the portal itself finally activated, creating a neat disc of blue-white light. “Initiating assault into Type-H metanatural realm.”
With a mental order, the Sentinels dove through first. After Cabal confirmed that the cloud of bots were not wiped out and had instead established a beachhead, the fleshier elements of our assault proceeded. I led the way, conscious of my stat lines as I entered a realm more heavily concentrated with the Warp’s energies.
The portal opened up into a convenient high ground, allowing me to appreciate the vastness of the realm of decay. Multi-yered wards filtered the thick Chaotic energies, allowing me and the rest of the Nexus crew to take in our environment without bsting minds from metaphysical sensory overload.
Calling it a garden was a severe understatement. It was like calling the Afro-Asian desert belt a sandbox. Shapes that resolved into parodies of pnts spread out to the horizon, and then twisted up into the infinite oily-rainbow skies in massive tendrils.
Bright colors stood out among the brown-green sludge of rot and decay made manifest, forming jelly-like simucra of flowers and fruits. The stark, clearly defined shapes of the Sentinels contrasted with the blobs shaped like humanoids and insects and strange beasts that they fended off. Blobs that, without our sensory filtration, would’ve been perceived as the disease-riddled daemons of the Lord of Decay.
Instead of the pus-filled, cyclopean Pguebearers with their rusted cleavers, I saw only sludgy water balloons on legs with long weapon pseudopods. Instead of swarms of flies and vermin, I just saw fat droplets flying towards my bots. A towering behemoth, half-slug and half-fly judging from its general shape, gave just enough definition to make out some details of its insectoid head; I could see where its compound eyes should be, and easily imagine how its mandibles and seven tongues are supposed to be barbed.
Maybe taking out all the cognitohazards from the Warp might be a buzzkill.
Though the great ocean of the Immaterium was mostly frozen, the metanatural kingdoms of Chaos Gods had far too concentrated and distilled Chaos within them for its antithetical Order to even hope to infect. It wasn’t as bad as the metaphysicists had calcuted though; The shit-colored blobs that were supposed to be daemons were very sluggish in their movements, even more so than typical for Nurgle’s legions. A look through the console showed that they were all performing at about three quarters’ strength in every stat line.
I’m not sure how much that made things easier for my bots and troops, but I’m sure the Eldar would appreciate the handicap.
As the Eldar came through, showing little signs of debilitation, I turned to their leaders. “Which way?” At that, Eldrad and his colleagues hastily formed a circle, and then the eye-like visors on their ornamented, conical helmets glowed. I watched as the Eldar psykers drew in the ambient metaphysical energies and filtered it through their runes and very essences to produce their unique fvor of psychic powers. Arcane lightning sparked between them, and then a muted shockwave knocked the whole circle down on their knees.
The rest of the Eldar warriors quickly formed an unnecessary protective ring around their seers, while in the background, their grav tanks and war walkers joined my Sentinels in keeping the tide of blobby manifestations of Nurgle at bay.
Eldrad had to use his staff to rise to his feet, trembling badly from the psychic aftershock of his ‘spell’. Being right in a Chaos God’s realm probably overloaded his casting circle, despite having more than a score of psykers to dilute the energies. Having the Warp in general fucked by my own spell matrix probably didn’t help. He pointed towards a hill in the distance, capped by a dome of massive, thorny vines.
Or that’s what they should be, anyway. Filtered vision and whatnot on my end.
A quick ping to Edward’s communicator had the leader of the 1st forming up the Nexus soldiers. The Sentinels will secure the portal and slowly expand the beachhead, while my elites could let loose and have some fun being an assault force.
“Alright people, spearhead!” the commander barked out, and the Nexus troops, both human and Eldar, quickly got into formation. The former took up the front lines, while Lelith and her gang of expert murderers were kept several lines back, ready to pounce out once the shooting inevitably turned into a melee. The craftworld Eldar division formed up right behind us, more so they could earn a participation trophy than any real aid. We could very well run this operation without them, but I’m trying to build diplomatic bridges, so it’s polite to allow them to feel like they’re contributing.
I took position at the head of the spearhead, with Edward and Sylvie on either side of me. “Remember our objective,” I reminded everyone on the general channel. “Rescue the prisoner. Everything else is irrelevant. Remove anything that gets in our way.”
“Understood Sev,” they answered almost in unison.
“Right then.” I began to move towards the edges of actual fighting. “Soldiers of the Nexus, let’s show these so-called daemons what true hell is like.”
“Peace through power!” Edward yelled through his vocalizer, and the others picked up the warcry as they marched along with me. Even Lelith and her crew were shrieking out the words eagerly. It was a march that quickly turned into a charge as we punched our way through the tide of Warp-manifestations.
Rifles and pistols etched with intricate mandas and runes spat out fat beams of white ser bearing a fraction of light from Azathoth’s realms, permanently deleting any diseased blobs they touched from existence. Tiberium bdes from 1st and the Nexus Eldar fshed out, draining away Warp energies to the point that the daemons lost their metaphysical structural integrity.
We tore through the tide of decay and disease like a fme through styrofoam. Big crab-like things tumbled as their legs were shorn off, and we tunneled through their spasming bodies. Sweeping bsts of white ser cleared away clouds of insect-shaped droplets.
The very nd beneath us heaved to resist us, so I spawned talismans of inscribed yellow paper and had them dispersed all around. The quakes faded into death rattles as the talismans nded and bled out raw Order as they combusted. The ropey, twisting pnt simucra that rose up to bar our path were simirly obliterated as sanctified sers and anti-corruptive yellow confetti struck them.
A quick check on the console showed that we were barely ten realtime-enforced minutes in by the time we cut our way through the protective dome and came across the prop of a decrepit building. Its walls were bent here and there like a caricature of a cartoon monster’s rundown hideout. Holes that should be windows were inconsistent in shape and pcement, and some betrayed their true purpose by sporting fangs at the edges, or thin barbed tongues curled and almost fully hidden from view.
Just like the rest of this realm’s flora and fauna, the whole structure was a manifestation of Nurgle, it would probably count as a greater daemon of sorts if I’m reading the stats right.
We were about to carve our way in when the rge, door-shaped jaw of the oversized mimic burst open, spreading a fog of Warp energy that made the craftworld Eldar with us cry out in arm. Probably supposed to be a disease cloud or something. In its wake and came a massive form that was unlike anything else we’ve encountered here.
Instead of a shit-brown blob like everything else in this realm, I saw a massive, churning cloud of diseased colors. Greens, browns, yellows and more swirled within it, creating a maelstrom that took the shape of an oversized humanoid with seven arms and seven legs. Solidified lightning formed something akin to antlers on the top of its head.
Its massive, scowling maw was a vortex that constantly spewed decay and infectious growth in a thick rolling fog. Smaller pinprick-like eddies served as its eyes somehow, casting the unique Warp energies of this garden and giving it the ability to literally reshape anything in sight with its power.
The quasi-sentient Warp spring that was Nurgle stomped out with an angry bellow that drove my soldiers down to their knees, so great was its metanatural emanations that it threatened to overload the protective runes of their Sardaukar armor. The craftworld Eldar were in much worse condition, their cries turning into messy gurgling.
A quick flick on my console slider released some of my divine power. Just enough to form a protective dome around my assault group and stop things from escating into a messy mass obliteration. The powers stolen from Azathoth pushed back the heavy Warp fog and purified the air within the dome of anything but the stale reality dreamt up by the Blind Idiot God.
The ground beneath us lost its metaphysical diseased colors and hardened into actual soil. The blobs that were supposed to be pntlife turned into bck, carbonized trees and vines. Droplet swarms that were caught in the affected zone instantly turned into the vermin that they were supposed to be and curled up or dropped dead.
Nurgle froze for a fraction of a second, and I’d like to think that it actually felt confusion at its failed attack and what it was sensing. Then my borrowed divinity overtook it, and the whole realm spasmed and squirmed as it was severed from its source of existence. The roiling storm of a Chaos God evaporated down into a violently bubbling orb, a perpetual fountain that spilled despair into being, only for my powers to snuff the physical manifestation of emotions.
I could snuff out the source completely, the consequences of such a thing still being studied by Vault Gesserit’s occultists suggested that the subsequent imbance would have catastrophic results to the Warp as a whole, and therefore all lifeforms bound to it. Seeing that I did not want gactic genocide on my hands, I kept my power output low and reached out to the angrily bubbling core of Nurgle.
Huh. It felt like holding onto a constantly shifting ball of cotton candy. I was expecting tar or congealed pus or something.
I turned back to my now recovered troops and allies, and ignored the stunned looks from the Eldar contingent. “Come, we’re still on the clock.” That snapped them back to their senses, and they joined my troops in carving up the thing that was supposed to be Nurgle’s mansion.
We entered the remains of the dying thing, and it didn’t take long to find our target. There, hanging in one corner, was a gibbet made -surprisingly - of a different kind of Warp energy. In it, a bone-white feminine form was curled up, dimly radiating genuine hope and vigor. It should be radiating purity as well, but its surface was marred by the green-brown tendrils of Nurgle’s corruption that spread like veins.
I heard the Eldar behind me swear in horror, and then gave in to the temptation to turn down my metanatural filters a bit.
The scene that gave me was utterly depressing. Amid the ruins of a decrepit shack, amid broken bottles and pots, a sickly looking Eldar woman hung in a cage over a shattered cauldron. Isha, the Eldar goddess of life and fertility, was shuddering like a mindbroken victim, appearing pristine save for the bck trails of dried diseased tears and drool running down her cheeks and chin. Her shriveled eyes stared at nothing, while her lips moved to mutter a soundless mantra. There was defiance in her still, but it was a defiance that had lost all sense of awareness, defiance as a blue screen.
I shrank my divine aura down and then using my console’s remote pickup to carry the boiling pus-ball that was Nurgle’s core with me, I walked over to the gibbet and carefully tore the goddess free from her cage. She weighed nothing in my arms, and it took little to realize that her whole body had been calcified and locked into her curled up pose. No signs of sentience stirred in her eyes.
The wailing of the Eldar in the background helped to further confirm it: The goddess Isha was almost irrevocably broken.
Almost, though.
As I said, her form still glowed faintly with hope and life (as a concept). I peered through the console to dig through the endless lines of Isha’s stats. Her core might have been cracked and corrupted, but there were still uninfected parts. And somewhere in there, I found a risky glimmer that might just keep this as a rescue mission instead of turning into a corpse repatriation operation.
I turned to silence the howling and gnashing of teeth from the Eldar contingent with a divine-infused gre. “I might be able to restore her,” I stated bluntly, “but it might come at a cost.”
The space elves all perked up, even Lelith and the other Nexus Eldar who were equally in shock.
“What…what would the cost entail?” a farseer asked. Then for some reason her voice took on a grim tone. “How many of us are required to restore her?”
“There’s no Eldar sacrifice required,” I quickly replied, cutting off any talk of offering souls and such nonsense. With a Warp construct of her power, Isha would likely have to drain the whole species to extinction just to gain some awareness, and even then it’d be for a short while. The goddess was intrinsically tied to the Eldar race, and with its numbers cut down to barely a trillion souls, she’ll never get anywhere close to operational power.
“What do you require of us then?” Eldrad asked.
Well, no sense in beating around the bush. I gave it to them bluntly, and checked the timer while they debated among themselves over it. We still had just under half an hour left before the portal has to switch to reserve batteries, but thankfully, the Eldar came to a unanimous consensus quickly enough.
With a sigh, I looked down at the broken goddess in my arms, and carefully channeled my divinity. Isha glowed, and she grew brighter as the light burned away the veins of corruption throughout her body. The Eldar watched in grim silence as their goddess then began to sizzle before their very eyes as the light consumed her. Isha didn’t react as she slowly disintegrated from the infused radiance, her eyes not even twitching and her mutterings never stumbling.
I dited time for myself to better keep track of the incineration, making sure that only Isha was cremated and none of the output accidentally hit Nurgle or the Eldar bystanders, as well as keeping track of the stat lines to minimize unwanted surprises. It took a long twenty seconds before most of Isha was burned away, and my arms adjusted to hold onto what was left of her. With the euthanizing of the broken goddess over, all that was left was a glowing, malleable blob of constructed divinity.
I stared hard at the leftover essence, and then pasted the amended values of the former goddess onto it. The light in my arms solidified into a pod as its console values began to change on its own. Some careful application of multi-dimensional divinity helped stabilize the process, and then the glowing shell in my arms dimmed.
The Eldar quite literally gasped as one as the watermelon-sized pod cracked audibly and then rattled. After doing a quick scroll through to confirm that the values were all in the green, I gave my audience a grin as the shell broke away into fading sheets of light.
“May I present to you, Isha, reborn.”
Despite the temptation, I did not raise the little Eldar girl that was the reconstituted goddess into the air like Simba, but instead let her sleep on peacefully in my arms.
I waited for the Eldar to recover from their shock before giving the orders to head back, though not before I had the core of the Chaos God hover up in front of me.
“In case you can understand me: If you seek revenge on me and my Nexus - and trust me, I will know of it - I will return here, and I will really put an end to you and your realm.”
With that threat delivered, I tossed Nurgle away to let him reform, and then had the teleporters recall us back to Commoragh. After that, I’ll have to figure out the logistics of housing an alien deity, and deal with the theological ramifications of adopting said alien goddess.
